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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

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Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#221

Post by iamacyborg »

bxparks wrote: post #82
bigthymer wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still upset that Google Maps no longer tracks my location. It was very useful to be able to go back and see how often and where I had gone. Is there another app where I can store this locally?

Strava? :-) Half-joking, half-serious, I haven't used Strava in years, I don't remember all its capabilities. Edit: Missed the "locally" part. Sorry no suggestions. Maybe Garmin has something?

Nope, Garmin only tracks your location when you record an activity that uses gps, which is good, frankly.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#222

Post by dlcarrier »

zyklonix wrote: post #171

Microsoft Songsmith is another one that deserved a second life. It let you hum or sing a melody and would auto-generate full backing tracks, guitar, bass, drums, chords, in any style you chose. It looked a bit goofy in the promo videos, but under the hood it was doing real-time chord detection and accompaniment generation. Basically a prototype of what AI music tools like Suno, Udio, or Mubert are doing today, fiftee…

It also had one of the best campy promotional videos ever produced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8GIwFkIuP8

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#223

Post by SeanAnderson »

daxfohl wrote: post #45

Heroku? I know it's still around, though IDK who uses it, but I miss those days when it was thriving. One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue. I often wonder, if AI had come 15 years earlier, would it have been a ton better because there weren't a billion different ways to do things? Would we have ever bothered to…

Didn't they offer free compute? IIRC all free compute on the Internet went away with the advent of cryptocurrencies as it became practical to abuse the compute and translate it directly into money.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#224

Post by GeneralMaximus »

toast0 wrote: post #125
Lerc wrote: post #26

Boot2Gecko or whatever the browser as Operating system was called. This was a project that should have focused on providing whatever its current users needed expanding and evolving to do whatever those users wanted it to do better. Instead it went chasing markets, abandoning existing users as it did so, in favour of potential larger pools of users elsewhere. In the end it failed to find a niche going forward while le…

It lives on as KaiOS. Has limited success as a low end phone platform now.

For a few short months circa 2016 or 2017, KaiOS was the number one mobile OS in India. This was probably because of all the ultra-cheap KaiOS-powered Reliance Jio phones flooding the Indian market at the time.

I noticed the trend when I was working on a major web property for the Aditya Birla conglomerate. My whole team was pleasantly surprised, and we made sure to test everything in Firefox for that project. But everyone switched to Android + Chrome over the next few years, which was a shame.

Today, India is 90% Chrome :(

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#225

Post by arjvik »

hyperific wrote: post #195

RAM Disks. Basically extremely fast storage using RAM sticks slotted into a specially made board that fit in a PCIe slot. Not sure what happened to the project exactly but the website disappeared sometime in 2023. The idea that you could read and write data at RAM speeds was really exciting to me. At work it's very common to see microscope image sets anywhere from 20 to 200 GB and file transfer rates can be a big bot…

I’m confused why this can’t be done in software?

    mount -t tmpfs ram /mnt/ramdisk

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#226

Post by JimDabell »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #193
JimDabell wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you can accurately describe it as client-side scanning and false positives were not likely. Depending upon how you view it, false positives were either extremely unlikely, or 100% guaranteed for practically everybody. And if you think the latter part is a problem, please read up on it! > I'm reminded of a recent hit-piece about Chat Control, in which one of the proponent politicians was quoted as compla…

Forgot about the concept of bugs have we? How about making Apple vulnerable to demands from every government where they do business? No thanks. I'll take a hammer to any device in my vicinity that implements police scanning.

> Forgot about the concept of bugs have we?

No, but I have a hard time imagining a bug that would meaningfully compromise this kind of system. Can you give an example?

> How about making Apple vulnerable to demands from every government where they do business?

They already are. So are Google, Meta, Microsoft, and all the other giants we all use. And all those other companies are already scanning your stuff. Meta made two million reports in 2024Q4 alone.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#227

Post by alisonatwork »

harel wrote: post #109

In the late 90s there was a website called fuckedcompany which was a place where people could spill the beans about startups (mainly in silicon valley). It was anonymous and a pretty good view into the real state of tech. Now there is twitter/x but it's not as focused on this niche.

The closest sites I've found are Web3 is Going Just Great and Pivot to AI, which are newsfeeds of various car crashes in their respective hype arenas, although without any insider scoops/gossip.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#229

Post by JimDabell »

btown wrote: post #189
JimDabell wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from the perspective of what surveillance policies it would have (and very possibly did) inspire/set precedent for… I can’t think of a single thing that’s come along since that is even remotely similar. What are you thinking of? I think it’s actually a horrible system to implement if you want to spy on people. That’s the point of it! If you wanted to spy on people, there are already loads of systems that exist whic…

The problem isn’t the system as implemented; the problem is the very assertion “it is possible to preserve the privacy your constituents want, while running code at scale that can detect Bad Things in every message.” Once that idea appears, it allows every lobbyist and insider to say “mandate this, we’ll do something like what Apple did but for other types of Bad People” and all of a sudden you have regulations that…

> The problem isn’t the system as implemented

Great!

> the problem is the very assertion “it is possible to preserve the privacy your constituents want, while running code at scale that can detect Bad Things in every message.”

Apple never made that assertion, and the system they designed is incapable of doing that.

> if a model can detect CSAM at scale, it can also detect anyone who possesses any politically sensitive image.

Apple’s system cannot do that. If you change parts of it, sure. But the system they proposed cannot.

To reiterate what I said earlier:

> The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked.

So far, you are saying that you don’t have a problem with the system Apple designed, and you do have a problem with some other design that Apple didn’t propose, that is significantly different in multiple ways.

Also, what do you mean by “model”? When I used the word “model” it was in the context of using another system as a model. You seem to be using it in the AI sense. You know that’s not how it worked, right?

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#230

Post by Animats »

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system.

- MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together about how to install and configure things. Probably would have eased the tradition to mobile. A version was actually shipped to developers, but it had to be covered up to justify the bailout of Next by Apple to get Steve Jobs.

- Transaction processing operating systems. The first one was IBM's Customer Information Control System. A transaction processor is a kind of OS where everything is like a CGI program - load program, do something, exit program. Unix and Linux are, underneath, terminal oriented time sharing systems.

- IBM MicroChannel. Early minicomputer and microcomputer designers thought "bus", where peripherals can talk to memory and peripherals look like memory to the CPU. Mainframes, though, had "channels", simple processors which connected peripherals to the CPU. Channels could run simple channel programs, and managed device access to memory. IBM tried to introduce that with the PS2, but they made it proprietary and that failed in the marketplace. Today, everything has something like channels, but they're not a unified interface concept that simplifies the OS.

- CPUs that really hypervise properly. That is, virtual execution environments look just like real ones. IBM did that in VM, and it worked well because channels are a good abstraction for both a real machine and a VM. Storing into device registers to make things happen is not. x86 has added several layers below the "real machine" layer, and they're all hacks.

- The Motorola 680x0 series. Should have been the foundation of the microcomputer era, but it took way too long to get the MMU out the door. The original 68000 came out in 1978, but then Motorola fell behind.

- Modula. Modula 2 and 3 were reasonably good languages. Oberon was a flop. DEC was into Modula, but Modula went down with DEC.

- XHTML. Have you ever read the parsing rules for HTML 5, where the semantics for bad HTML were formalized? Browsers should just punt at the first error, display an error message, and render the rest of the page in Times Roman. Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly?

- Word Lens. Look at the world through your phone, and text is translated, standalone, on the device. No Internet connection required. Killed by Google in favor of hosted Google Translate.

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